Chapter V: Part 5

As things were, she graciously condescended to order Harris down to the cabin with her, and they discussed together the inevitable curried tin of Pacific cookery. It was wonderfully light and bright in the little cabin, which was large for the size of the ship, and had plenty of berth and locker space, besides its neatly fitted trade shelves. The bulkheads were painted white picked out with blue (they were satinwood and bird’s-eye maple underneath the paint, a thing which had astonished and perplexed more than one ship’s carpenter in the past quarter of a century), and there was a pretty bird’s-nest fern in a basket hanging from the skylight, and the seats were covered with the neatest thing in blue and white trade prints that Auckland could produce. Vaiti’s taste was evident everywhere, and Vaiti herself, hair freshly combed and held back with a bright ribbon, laces and frills dainty and immaculate as ever, looked, as she demurely poured out tea (you will seldom find the teapot absent from the table of a colonial ship), quite the last sort of person by whom a native A.B. might expect to be knocked into the scuppers. Yet, truth to tell, the unlicked Harris, wolfing his food at the opposite side of the table, was very much better liked by the crew, even though he was heavy-handed enough at times; and he certainly understood more about the five A.B.’s and one ordinary seaman who inhabited the forecastle than did Vaiti, who was half one of themselves, and therefore thought them beneath consideration as a rule.

Of this fact he proceeded to give an illustration when the curry and the tea and the fried bananas were almost done, and nobody’s dinner could be spoilt by unpleasant news.

“Think you’re in for a good time, don’t you, Cap?” he said.

Vaiti, the economical of words, merely nodded. But her face spoke for her.

Harris was never quite sure whether he liked Vaiti in an uncomfortable, indefinite way, or heartily hated her. To-day the balance perhaps inclined in the latter direction. He watched her face with some interest as he said:

“That’s where you spoils yourself, Cap. You ain’t. And if you want my advice, which you never do, I’d tell you that the sooner you ’bouts ship and back to Niué the better.”

Vaiti bit slowly through the piece of bread she was eating and deliberately chewed it, eyeing the mate all the time, before she condescended to answer.

“Mph!” was all she said at last. She had never studied diplomacy, but she knew how much more you learn in general by letting the other person lead the conversation than by talking yourself. And it occurred to her that Harris wanted to make himself important by hinting and patronising over some ship business which might, or might not, be in his department. Well, let him. She would not give him a lead.

Harris, on his part, got angry at once, and blurted out what he had meant to keep a good deal longer.

“Oh, very well,” he said. “You can do just as you likes, of course, but where you’ll find yourself when it comes to a question of mutiny, that’s another two-and-six. Musling curtains on the ports, and white table-cloths, and ropes all flemish-coiled on deck is going to help you a lot then, ain’t they? And if ever I’ve seen signs of trouble in a crew, I seen them to-day, and you knows it—ma’am.”

The last word came with a jerk, screwed out, as it were, by an ominous flash of Vaiti’s eye.

Vaiti herself was thinking very quickly indeed, but you would not have imagined it if you had seen her slowly scooping out the inside of a mummy-apple, and as slowly eating it. She was obliged to acknowledge to herself, now Harris had spoken, that there had been something unusual about the demeanour of more than one of the men since their departure yesterday. But mutiny? Nonsense! Indigestion from too much pork, more likely. She did not believe for an instant that any crew once handled by her father and herself would have an ounce of mutiny left in the lot, if you ran them through a stamp-mill and assayed the result three times over.

So she merely remarked, between spoonfuls:

“You talk plenty nonsense. You keep those men work, they no squeak. Suppose you finish eat, you go tell Gray he come down ki-ki.”

“All right!” said Harris meaningly, trying to make an effective and tragic exit. He was really not at all easy in his mind, and Vaiti’s attitude did nothing to relieve his apprehension of what might be about to follow. The men had never dragged on the rein as they had done these two days past, and he felt it in his bones that there was more than met the eye in the matter.

Vaiti, for her part, was so much incensed by the tone of his remonstrance that she would not even listen to the conviction which began to force itself upon her own mind, next day, that there was really something astray. Luck in general seemed to have deserted them. With a fair wind the schooner should have made the run to Raratonga in three days, but on the afternoon of the second day a dead calm had fallen, and they lay helpless in the trough of the sea by four o’clock, three hundred miles from anywhere.

“All-a-time I saying no good trust those trade winds, when that (adjective) Cook Islands be near,” sighed Vaiti, scanning the horizon vainly right and left. Like a true sailor, she was generally cross in a calm.

“I wish we was out of this, ma’am, I do,” remarked Gray, who was busy spinning sinnet at her feet on the deck. For some odd reason, the sour old bo’sun generally found her more approachable than the others.

“Why?” asked Vaiti, almost amiably.

“Because, ma’am, of that, for one thing. And hothers.”

He pointed forward, and Vaiti saw what she had not noticed before, the ship’s carpenter, a powerful young Mangaian, lying flat on the foc’sle head and obviously weeping.

“They’ve been at that game, one and another, off and on, ma’am, all to-day,” he said. “And you know yourself ’ow we’ve been put to it to get the work out of them. Darned if I knows what monkey tricks they’s up to, but I allow we’re liable to understand all about it before very long, for that sea-lawyer of a fellow, Shalli, he’s bin speechifyin’ down in the foc’sle ’alf of this watch, like a bloomin’ ’Yde Park sosherlist, he has.”

Vaiti glanced at her watch.

“Make him eight bell,” she ordered, scanning the foc’sle hatch.

“Ay, ay, ma’am,” said Gray readily, passing on the order.

The watch below were prompt enough about turning out, but Shalli the forlorn could not, it seemed, find energy enough to get up and turn in. Instead, he beat his curly head upon the planks and began to sob. Vaiti took no notice of him whatever, but just strolled nonchalantly for a minute into her cabin, and reappeared with a slight projection in the bosom of her muslin dress that had not been there before. Harris and Gray looked at each other significantly, and the former cast a swift glance about the vacant horizon. No, not a shred of sail, not a trail of smoke. Only the glancing flying-fish, and the oily, glittering swell, and the hard, pale, empty sky.

The men, who had all been standing in a bunch by the hatch, now signalled to Shalli, who put off the rest of his weeping to a more convenient season, and got upon his feet. Then the six began advancing slowly and uncertainly to the break of the poop. They were a good-looking crew in their way, all Eastern Pacific men, with bright eyes and well-featured brown faces, and their dress—the brilliant red or yellow “pareo” of the islands, gaily figured with enormous white flowers, and the bright cotton shirt or coloured jersey—lent a distinctly operatic air to the little scene. Vaiti and her officers, however (like Molière’s _bourgeois_ who had talked prose all his life without knowing it), had lived in the midst of picturesque and extraordinary things most of their lives, and therefore took no interest, as a rule, in anything save the sternest practicalities.

And it was stern enough in all conscience, this fact with which they were confronted. The men were mutinous, beyond doubt.

Vaiti’s mind rapidly ran over all possible causes for the trouble, even while Shalli was stepping forward and opening his mouth to speak. It could not be rough treatment, because, as a matter of fact, the men were no worse handled on the _Sybil_ than on most other island schooners, and an occasional knock-down blow is not the sort of thing that a Pacific native will seriously resent. It could not be any objection to go to Raratonga—the crew were mostly Cook Islanders themselves, and glad of a chance of seeing their homes. Nor could it be dislike to her command, for a chief rank counts tremendously among Polynesians; and islanders who were ruled at home by a queen of her family would be most unlikely to strike against the authority of one of the Makea race, unless for some very grave cause. It was, of course, possible that they had planned to seize the schooner and run off with it.... She put her hand up to her bosom, and played with the laces that lay over that hard substance under the dress....

But Shalli was speaking now, in answer to her sharp query as to what they wanted there.

He had a good deal to say, and he said it with flashing eyes and much eloquence, using his slender, pointed, brown fingers a good deal to emphasise his remarks, and turning dramatically from his mates to Vaiti, and back to his mates again. Harris listened anxiously, catching only a stray word here and there, for his knowledge of Maori was confined to the few phrases used in running the ship. Shalli was certainly saying that somebody was going to die—that somebody had got to die, and immediately—to judge by the emphasis with which he spoke.... The mate was, as Vaiti had once told him, rather chicken-hearted underneath his great bulk and strength. He felt himself turning chilly, for all the burning sky. What the devil did that fiend of a Vaiti mean by standing there listening as calmly as if they were paying her compliments on her eyes? Perhaps there was no particular trouble after all; but her demeanour was no guarantee, for she would have looked like that if they had all been on the verge of drowning, or burning, or hanging together, any day of the week.

Gray, on the other hand, did not trouble to try and make out anything, but cut a large quid and chewed it at leisure, idly looking on. He did not know if the men meant mutiny or not, and he did not particularly care. They were three whites against six niggers, and there were firearms on their side. And he had seen mutinies in his time beside which any little amusement that could be got up by half a dozen amiable Cook Islanders would seem a mere Sunday-school tea-party. Let them mutiny if they liked. It would not mean the interruption of the work for half a watch.

And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop, and the _Sybil_ rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and the useless sails slapped rhythmically upon the mast. And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the group of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved countenance until quite the end of Shalli’s long speech.

When he had finished he turned his face away, and instantly began to weep. And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on, also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their hands to heaven.

“If this isn’t a bloomin’ mutiny, it’s a bloomin’ lunatic asylum,” declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole ship’s company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young woman in an expensively pretty frock.

“Ow-ow-ow!” went Shalli, getting quite beyond his own control.

“Ey-ah, eyah!” screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki, fluttering his hands like frantic pigeons.

“For God’s sake, Vaiti, tell us what’s up,” called Harris, sending his bull-like tones through the confusion.

And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice in order to be heard. Her face, its hard calm broken up at last, was black with rage, and she had pulled out her revolver, and was holding it in her hand, though, strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.

“That ——, —— witch-man belong Niué, he curse them, they say they die!” she screamed. “By’n-by I cut him liver out!”

“What witch-man?” bellowed Harris. “Don’t understand. That white bloke—him with the red hair and the scar on his nose—who dresses native, and lives native up in the bush? Saw him lookin’ at you like as if he’d like to knife you, from behind Mata’s house.”

“No, pig-head! no white man got ’mana’ for make die that way,” shrieked Vaiti, shaking her revolver without effect at the men. “Niué witch-man. What man you mean? I not see——”

But she did see at that moment, and to Harris’s utter dismay she dropped the revolver on the deck and flung her skirt over her head.

“My Gord! she’s mad now,” cried Harris. The crew paid not the least attention, but continued to weep with lungs of brass. The mate’s head went round. He felt as if he was going out of his senses, too. Gray, who seemed to be the only normal person left on board, went up to Vaiti and plucked her dress off her face.

“Now, ma’am, keep ’er ’ead to wind,” he remonstrated. “What’s got ’old of the Capting? Blest if we ever saw you afraid before.”

Vaiti turned on him like a tigress.

“You think me frighten, you parrot-face, bal’-head, humpback pig-monkey! Think some more those thing, and I shoot some hole in you lie-making tongue, learn you talk to me. I tell you——”

The hubbub on deck was calming down a little now, and subsiding into lost and homeless wails. It was possible to make oneself heard.

“I tell you, that thing Alliti see ’long Niué, he one dead man. Captain schooner _Ikurangi_—same I making tart [chart] all wrong, so he go drown, he and him mate. You think it good thing one dead man he go walk along Niué, looking me?”

“A cat may look at a king,” said Harris, who had realised that no fighting was afoot, and therefore was very brave just now. “Besides, that red-head man wasn’t no ghost—he borrowed a pouchful of tobacco off of me, and never paid it back.”

“What sort that man?” demanded Vaiti. “He small, all same Gray, he ugly all same you, got red hair, cut ’long him nose, tooth all break?”

“That’s him,” agreed Harris.

Vaiti took a turn across the deck, and fell silent, angrily chewing a lock of her hair. The horrid vision of Donahue risen from his ocean grave, and wandering about the islands as a malignant ghost, bent on avenging his death, had struck her as such a fancy could only strike an islander, and almost paralysed her active mind. Now she realised that it was merely a case of mistaken newspaper report, and that Donahue had somehow escaped from the wreck of his schooner, and was once more roaming the islands in the flesh—at the very lowest ebb of fortune, it was evident, but probably none the less dangerous for that. She was quite certain that he was in some way at the bottom of this business of cursing the crew, although no doubt the witch-doctor and Mata had been intermediary. And it was no trifle. Sheer mutiny she would have much preferred.

“Wot’s it all about?” asked Gray, who had not been so long in the islands as the mate. “Wot’s the odds if a lot of bally niggers thinks they’ve been cursed? Seems to me anythin’ the witch-doctor could do wouldn’t be likely to harm a crew that’s been salted by our old man in the cursin’ way. There ain’t no witch-what-d’ye-call-’em about the islands that can lay over ’im for language.”

“Oh, shut up! You don’t know anything about it,” said Harris with irritation.

“Suppose you tells me,” suggested Gray, tucking another quid into his cheek, and looking dispassionately at the crew, who were now lying on deck rolling about with the motion of the vessel, and looking half dead already. “Doesn’t seem as if we was goin’ to have much bother with that lot.... And you gettin’ as white at the gills as a flounder, thinkin’ they was goin’ to take charge. Go ’ome and learn a ladies’ dancin’-class, Mr. ’Arris; you ain’t fit to ’andle men.”

“I’ll handle you if——” Harris was beginning roughly, when Vaiti, whose temper had been badly ruffled by the events of the last half-hour, stepped across the deck and delivered two stinging blows, one on Harris’s right ear and one on Gray’s left.

“You take’m that,” she said. “Alliti, you speak bo’sun about Maori ’mana.’ Glay, you lemember Alliti mate, no give cheek.”

“Want to know if I’ve got any left for myself, before I start givin’ it away,” observed the bo’sun ruefully, rubbing his face. “But better be slapped nor neglected by a pretty girl, hany day, says I.”

Vaiti did not smile, but leaned over the rail, and began staring at the crew. She was in no mood for flattery.

“Well, if you want to know, it’s like this,” said Harris. “These native blokes, they thinks some of their chiefs has got what they call ’mana.’”

“Wot’s that mean?”

“Pretty near any thin’, take it by and large, but one meanin’s all we want, and that’s the notion they have that these chiefs can sort of blast ’em with a curse, so’s they’ll go away and die. Like as if I was a chief, and you was a common man, same as you are, anyhow, and I was to say, ’Gray, you go off out of this and die next Thursday at four bells in the afternoon watch.’ And you says to me, says you, ’Ay, ay, sir,’ says you.”

“Blowed if I would,” ejaculated the bo’sun.

“Yes, you would, you chump, because you’d be a bloomin’ native, and they always does. So off you’d go, and when Thursday come you’d lie down and die at four bells, wherever you happened to be.”

“Wot of?”

“Nothin’—you’d run down like a watch—sort of ’stop short never to go again’ business, like the grandfather’s clock—and when you was dead you’d stay dead. That’s all.”

“And I never ’eard worse rot in all me days,” said the bo’sun disgustedly. “Think I’m going to believe all that?”

“Who cares what you believes or what you don’t?” demanded Harris, “You’ll —— well see all about it soon enough. Vaiti she says they says Mata went to the witch-doctor, who they’re as much afraid of as any chief in Niué, for all they’re by way of bein’ Christian, and he cursed them up and down and inside and out, worst style, and says they’re all to die by sunset, to-night. And if I knows anything of natives they’ll do it. I’ll lay you, we got to work the ship up to Raratonga ourselves—if we ever get there. Of all the low-down, mean skinks that ever walked, them natives are the worst. They haven’t a blessed scrap of consideration in them for anyone but themselves. Here we are with every man-jack of these fellows got an advance on his wages, and they says they’re going to die! Die! I’ve no patience with them. I do hate selfishness and meanness.”

*CHAPTER XII*

*BREAKING THE MANA*

Vaiti all this time had been steadily watching the men as they lay about on the main-deck in various attitudes of limp resignation. One or two—notably the emotional Shalli—were already beginning to look ill. Matters looked badly enough for the _Sybil_. It was in the hurricane season, and signs were not wanting that the calm would break up with energy when it did break. If the crew persisted in their dying, other people who had not been in any way subjected to the witch-doctor’s operations might find it incumbent on them to die too. She did not for a moment doubt the Niuéan’s power to slay. Had she not more than once seen the queen, who was her own cousin, politely dismiss some offender with the significant remark, “I wish I may never see you again after to-morrow” (for the queen was always courteous, and would never have used the crude terms of a Niuéan witch-doctor); and had not every one on the island known that with the next evening’s sunset the wretch would lay him down and die as surely as the dark would fall? These men were doomed, and the ship would miss the steamer and the cargo would not be sold, and possibly the schooner would be lost in the blow that was creeping up, and none of them would ever go home any more.

Thus the native side of Vaiti spoke. But now the white side woke up and demanded its innings too. Was it endurable that the red-headed rat of a Donahue (for she was as certain that he had been at the bottom of the matter as only a woman with no direct evidence to go on can be) should win the last move in the deadly game they had been playing this year and more. Was she to get into difficulties, and perhaps lose the ship, the very first time that she had taken off the _Sybil_ all alone? The fact that such a disaster would include the losing of herself did not trouble, as it did not console, her. She would leave her reputation behind her, and people, when they spoke of Vaiti of the Islands, would say——

No, they wouldn’t, and they shouldn’t. The white blood was up now. It was impossible to prevent the “mana” from working. Well, let it be. She would do the impossible. She had done the impossible before, in many ways; it was the only sort of thing really very well worth doing, in the opinion of Vaiti of the Islands.

Whatever was to be done must be done quickly. The storm was not far away, and the _Sybil_ was rolling in the trough of the increasing swell with every rag of sail set.

“What you goin’ to do?” asked Harris hopelessly, as he saw her move. “Give them medicine? It ain’t any good.”

“Yes, give ’em medicine—you and Gray, you giving it plenty by’n-by,” said Vaiti calmly, beckoning the two men over to her. The crew continued to lie on the deck, giving no sign of life but an occasional groan. The wind was beginning to cry a little among the rigging, just whimpering, like a chidden child. A glassy tinkling of foam sounded about the keel. The sun was almost down.

“You listen me,” said the girl, her handsome, hawk-like features looking curiously sombre in the orange light. “I speak those men in Maori. I tell them some thing—thing not belong ’papalangi.’ You no understan’. Wait.”

Then, with a look on her face that the white men had never seen there before, and were never to see again, she stepped swiftly down the ladder, crossed the main-deck, and stood in the midst of the prostrate crew.

As though struck themselves by a spell, Harris and Gray remained motionless on the poop, only swaying with the unconscious movement of the sailor to the roll of his ship, while they watched with fascinated eyes the scene upon the lower deck. The crew at first lay still as logs, while Vaiti stood and looked at them—only looked. Presently they began to open their eyes and roll over, and the weeping, which had apparently ceased, began again.

Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above her head, with her light muslin dress fluttering in the wind and all her magnificent hair falling to her knees, burst into such a flood of speech as made the two hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid amaze. There is no language in the world so full of eloquent possibilities as the Maori tongue—even in the somewhat debased and altered type that is current among the islands. And, hidden away somewhere in the strange nature of this strange thing in woman’s shape, there was more than a touch of the true witch wildness and fire.

“Lord!” said Harris, in a tone of awe. “She’s the devil himself!”

She looked it, as she stood there in that livid light, her arms stretched high to heaven, her voice—was there ever a voice so full of passion, prophecy, command?—ringing out, now high, now low, now in tones vibrating with some subtle suggestion of horror that caused even the uncomprehending whites upon the poop to feel a cold shudder about the region of the spine. Upon the crew the effect was marvellous, yet, from Gray’s and Harris’s point of view, unsatisfactory as well. The limp figures sat up, it was true, wept afresh, and even rose to their feet before long; but it was only to rush wildly up and down the heaving deck, driven, it seemed, by the sting of an agony greater than any they had suffered yet. Above the loose sails thundered and the wind wailed wickedly.

Gray, at a motion from the mate, went to the idle wheel and grasped the spokes. The _Sybil_ would want watching soon.

“Strike me pink if this isn’t the craziest ship’s company outside a lunertic asylum from Yokohama to the ’Orn,” muttered the bo’sun to himself. “Now, what the ’ell is _that_? Ho, Jemmy Gray, why don’t you look for a berth as a bally stoker in a bally Red Sea liner, or a supercargo on a Chinese pirate junk, and ’ave a quiet life at your age? Here, Mr. ’Arris, you going to let ’er shoot ’erself before your heyes?”

Vaiti had plucked out her revolver again, but instead of threatening the crew with it, she was holding it close to her own curly head, all the time pouring forth a river of eloquent Maori, strongly charged with adjurations and threats. It needed no translation to understand so much, not to see the abject if inexplicable terror of the crew, who cowered and howled in an extremity of distress every time she raised the pistol to her head.

“Vaiti, Vaiti! What’re you doing, Cap?” yelled Harris. “You’ll shoot yourself! Are you crazy? What are you givin’ ’em, for Cord’s sake?”

Vaiti turned round, and cried angrily at him:

“Hold ’m tongue! You no leave me myself, very quick I shooting you. I tell those men I great chief, no one can take ’um curse away, but can come ’long all those men myself, suppose they die—go Raratonga when ’um night come, an’ all those man soul he running quick, quick, all a-cold, ’long those mountains top Raratonga where ’um dead man he go to jumping-off place. A—a—h! I put one bullet in head belong me, very quick, suppose those men they got dam cheek go an’ die. I coming, very dead, very angry, I go ’long that soul, all a-time; no let ’um rest, no let ’um see woman fliend, die long time ago—I take big club belong chief, make ’um run, cry, all-a-time—no sleep, no eat, no lie down! A—a—h! no go heaven, no go hell, all-a-time, for ever’n ever, Amen. I pay him out for going die!”

She stormed through the brief speech like a hot-season squall, and instantly returned to the natives. Harris, struck dumb by the entirely unprecedented nature of the situation, could find no vent for his feelings save in plucking off his cap and casting it under his feet. She was threatening the crew that she would kill herself if they died; follow them to the land of shades (the entrance to which was popularly supposed to be over the edge of a certain desolate, far-up mountain precipice in Raratonga), and make it so hot for them in the “otherwhere” that they would certainly wish they hadn’t dared to die.... What on earth was a man to do in a ship commanded by a thing—he could not call it a woman—that talked like that—with night coming on, too, and something very like a bad blow unpleasantly near?

Vaiti did not leave him long in doubt as to what he was to do. The crew, driven previously to the verge of frenzy by her gruesome threats, became entirely frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed her address to Harris. They ran up and down the deck; they shrieked, they prayed, they besought. Vaiti, with the eye of a hunter watching a quarry almost driven to bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery eloquence, and just at the moment when the men seamed driven to the highest point of human endurance, turned to the mate with a triumphant cry.

“Now, Alliti! he all right by’n-by: I no shoot myself, I think. You and bo’sun you get rope’s end very quick, give ’um order shorten sail, make ’um go. I think he go; he too much plenty frighten die ’long me.”

“Too much plenty frighten” the men were indeed. The threat that Vaiti had made—for the carrying out of which they doubted neither her ability nor her will, any more than she did herself—was so much more potent than the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of the one paled before the terror of the other. For the moment, they felt that they might not be able to live, but they certainly must not die; and it was right in the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate and bo’sun came in with their rope’s ends and settled the matter once for all. An hour ago, red-hot irons only would have moved them to hurry up with their dying. Now a couple of ropes’ ends, laid about among the six with a will, drove them howling up the masts and out along the yards, where, with Gray and Harris still after them, and Vaiti threatening from below, they succeeded in getting the sails stowed and the vessel snug in very little over the ordinary time. The blow that followed kept all hands busy the night through, but it came from the right quarter, and the _Sybil_ fled before it at such a speed that morning found her only half a day’s run from Raratonga, with the wind quieting down to a pleasant breeze, the schooner uninjured, and the crew as cheerful and busy as they had ever been in their lives.

Vaiti caught the steamer, sold her copra, and saw it on the wharf ready to load. Then she went back to the schooner, and waited till the last of the men returned.

“Suppose you like go die now, plenty time for you,” she said. “Plenty good sailor-man stop Raratonga. You go ’long die; I no want.”

The men looked at her sheepishly, and Shalli, the spokesman, scratched his head and surveyed a heap of tributary pigs, fowls, and fruit that lay on the deck of the schooner before he answered. The crew had many relations about Raratonga, and the relations had done them very well this trip.

“Many thanks, great chieftainess,” he said at last, in his own tongue. “We are much obliged to you, but we have changed our minds, and now we do not ever mean to die at all.”

*CHAPTER XIII*

*THE GAME PLAYED OUT*

Every one in the trader’s had gone to bed, and Vaiti, barefoot and dressed in dark cotton, had just got out of her room by the window, and was gliding noiselessly down the back verandah.

The moon was down, and the thick darkness under the trees of the village covered her safely as she slipped along at the backs of the little white, palm-thatched houses. It was not at all likely that any native would be about in the middle of the night, but one could never reckon on white men, of whom there were several in the little town—and Vaiti, being engaged as usual on “urgent private affairs,” did not want any inquiries.

She got away from the village without remark, and then struck into one of the narrow grass roads penetrating the bush. Everything was asleep. The little green parrots were hidden deep under heavy leaves, each with its noisy head tucked under its wing. The lizards that had been darting and flickering all day long about the path now slept, chill as little stones, among the roots of the trees. There was a cold, dewy smell in the air, and the palm-tree plumes were motionless as drawings in Indian ink against the violet gloom of the sky. Very far away the immemorial music of the reef beat softly in the dark.

Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly. She had a long way to go, and she wanted to be back in her neat, white, mosquito-curtained bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, before the trader’s wife should come in with her morning cup of tea. Vaiti was a past mistress in the art of avoiding useless comment.

Three miles, five miles, seven miles.... It was right at the other side of the island, past mile after mile of tangled bush, acre after acre of sparsely planted, rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy cocoanut, heavy with fruit. Oranges grew by the track here and there; broad green banners of banana leaf blotted out whole sections of the stars, and slim, quaint mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly coral rocks. Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a little refreshment on her way from time to time, as the wayfarer may always do in the kindly South Sea climate.

She struck at last into a narrow track leading off the main pathway—so small that in the dusk of the starry night it must have been invisible save for a mass of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown entrance and made a landmark. Afterwards came a mile or two of tangled walking among clumps of pink and scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all reduced to a common blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was scarce footing for a goat.... A lonely God-forsaken region this; not a village, nor even the gleam of a solitary white-washed hut. What had the “Kapitani” of the _Sybil_ to do with such a place?

Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do. She had gathered in the town that the mysterious white man who “lived native” in the bush had his dwelling about this lonely neighbourhood. It was very well known to her, and she meant to find the man’s dwelling-place, and see him with her own eyes before....

Well, that was still to come.

It took her rather longer than she had expected, but she did at last succeed in finding the tumble-down little palm-leaf shanty, built against the side of a rock, that she had heard described. It was a miserable place, so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the purple gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and looking like nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves and rubbish piled against the rock. She trod noiselessly round its three sides, and listened here and there. The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat hung up from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across the opening. There was a faint sound of slow, heavy breathing from within. The man was evidently asleep.

Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled away a piece of the loose grey coral of which it was composed. Then, sheltering herself behind a clump of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in a fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell of a wild pig wandering in the bush at night. At the same time she cast a lump of coral with all her strength down the side of the big rock, whence it landed with a crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying itself completely.

The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought out the owner of the hut, very cross and sleepy, clad only in a pareo, and angrily anxious for the safety of his patch of yams. He carried a torch in his hand, made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick (“Must have run out every bit of credit at the stores,” thought Vaiti parenthetically), and he was, beyond all shadow of doubt, against all common probability, the red-haired master of the _Ikurangi_.

If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind the hibiscus boughs would have slain him where he stood. Vaiti quivered with rage as she watched him shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted red hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely lower than any coloured native on the island.... He had not prospered since he escaped the wreck of the _Ikurangi_—how or where she did not care to know. He looked as if he had been living on the natives and half drinking himself to death, as was indeed the case.

But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his unprosperous case. In her opinion, he ought to have been dead long ago. There could be no peace of mind for her while he was still drifting about the Pacific, ever on the alert to do her an evil turn. She was not equal to actual murder, and, in any case, Niué was a British-owned island, with a resident Commissioner and a regular nest of missionaries, where you had to be very careful of what you did. But if any accident—a safe, convenient accident—should befall him by-and-by, why, it would certainly be an advantage to the _Sybil_ and her owners. Well, that might come about, and without introducing Saxon into it either. In such a delicate matter Saxon’s interference would very likely have acted much as a charge of dynamite might act in the destruction of a wasps’ nest—something more than the wasps would probably come to grief.

She waited until the ugly creature had rolled back into his cottage and shut the make-shift door. Then she slipped down from the rock once more, and began the second part of her errand. Neither then, nor at any other time, did she trouble to find out the manner of Donahue’s escape. If she had, she would have heard that he had been picked up by a native canoe, floating about on a piece of wreck the day after the disaster that destroyed the _Ikurangi_, and that, he had spent a good many months on a neighbouring island before a stray schooner had consented to accept his watch for passage money and convey him as far as Niué—the only place near their course where a penniless beachcomber would have been allowed to land. As things were, he was more or less smuggled off, and thought best to take refuge in the bush at once. The moneyless adventurer is not encouraged in islands belonging to the British Crown.

It is easy, therefore, to understand why Donahue, living under an assumed name in the far interior of the island, had not been recognised, and was not likely to be, by any one save the person whom his presence most concerned. His malice against Vaiti had by no means evaporated with the events that took place on Vaka. He did not, as it happened, suspect her of having actually caused the loss of the _Ikurangi_, but he was of a darkly superstitious nature, and laid down his ill-luck, first, last, and all through, to the fact of her influence. She had been a “Jonah” of the worst kind to him, and he would have been very glad indeed to serve her any ill turn of any kind that might be possible. But only the small piece of spite compassed through Mata had, so far, lain within his power.

Vaiti had still a mile or two to go, and it was waxing very late, or rather, early. She almost ran along the winding rocky path, following it as easily as if broad day or full moon had surrounded her instead of star-lit dark. Now the sound of the sea, unheard for the last hour, broke out again, and a cold salt breath from the beach cut through the heavy perfume of the forest track. In another minute she was out of the wood and fairly running down a sloping, sandy track that led to a little white house standing alone on the shore.... She laughed as she ran—it was such a soft, clear night, and the sea called so pleasantly down in the dark, and she did so dearly love an adventure—especially when all the world imagined her to be sleeping quietly in her mosquito-netted bed.

There was no secrecy about this matter apparently. The house had a good wooden door, and she rapped loudly on it with a stone, calling at the same time, “Sona! Sona! Wake up!”

There was a brief interval, in which the rollers tore at the beach and the palms swung and crashed overhead, uninterrupted by other sound. Sona was evidently asleep. She struck loudly on the door again. This time some one answered in a drowsy voice, and a slow, shuffling foot came to the door. The hinges creaked, and in another minute a small, bent, feeble figure appeared on the threshold.

“Tck! tck!” it clucked. “Is there magic in the air, and have I grown fifty years younger, that the lovely maidens come to my door in the starlight once more? Is it my beauty that has struck you to the heart, chieftainess Vaiti; or do you want a charm to catch the love of some one less deserving than myself?”

A fit of coughing interrupted him; he crept out to the open air, and clung to the door-post, shaking all over with the violence of the paroxysm. There was more light here, down by the foaming rollers; one could see, if one had been walking half the night in the dark bush, that the man was very small and hairy, very decrepit, and very, very old. Indeed, the personal appearance of Sona, solitary recluse of the Avarangi beach, good Nonconformist Christian on Sundays, and heathen witch-doctor out of business hours, was a very important item of his stock-in-trade. He looked his part to perfection, and knew it. His very name was a piece of business, even though, rightly pronounced and written, it was that of the godly man of Nineveh. When Shark-Tooth of Avarangi had consented, largely for reasons of policy, to join the mission fold a good many years before—the last straggling heathens on the island having been then “brought in” by the exertions of a determined and energetic missionary—he had selected the name of Jonah for his baptismal title solely because, so far as he could ascertain, the original bearer of the name was proverbial for bringing bad luck to his enemies—and that was the sort of reputation that Shark-Tooth especially coveted.

Vaiti had not met him before, but she knew him well by reputation, and was very sure that he knew all he cared to know—probably a good deal—about her. It was, she thought, a case for going straight to the point, so she went very straight indeed.

“Let me in, Sona,” she said in his own tongue. “I want to talk with you, and I want to buy you; for you and I are wise people, and I know that there is nothing that may not be bought.”

“Crah—crah—crah!” cackled Sona, in a feeble old man’s laugh, tacking a joke to the end of it that might well have raised a blush on Vaiti’s cheek if she had been capable of such a weakness. He led the way into the house, still cackling, lit an ill-smelling kerosene lamp, and sank down upon the mats, a mere heap of crumpled cotton clothes, old bones, and ancient wickedness.

Vaiti pulled out her cigar-case, tossed the old creature a cigar, which he clutched at eagerly, and lit one for herself. Then she squatted down on the mats, her back against the wall, and puffed for a minute or two in silence. Old Sona watched her eagerly with his glassy little eyes. He saw that she was not angry at the part he had played in the late unpleasant occurrence upon the schooner, or at least that she did not mean to resent it. He had heard all about the strange happenings of the voyage, and was a good deal awed at the power of the woman who had actually broken the spell of his curse—in which, be it observed, he believed most fully himself, with excellent reasons for doing so. And he was really very anxious to know what she wanted now, and especially what he was going to make by it.

Vaiti pulled at her cigar vigorously for a minute to make it draw well, and then, with a leisurely puff, remarked in Sona’s own tongue:

“Mata gave you a gold ring to curse my sailors that they should die—all the village knows of it, so you need not deny it, old man with the face of a scavenger-crab. Was it not foolish of you to set yourself against Vaiti, the great sea-princess—very foolish to run into danger, and for so little?”

“Yes, yes, so little,” repeated Sona, in a kind of wail.

“Now I come to buy you for myself,” went on Vaiti, puffing between words (she smoked like most women, very hard and fast). “I buy like a great chief’s daughter, and you shall feed and drink well for a long time if you are faithful to me. If not, I shall split you open with my knife as one splits open a fish on the beach, and leave you out on the strand, so that the crabs may come and eat you before you are dead. That is what I shall do to you.”

“I belong to the high chieftainess, soul and liver,” quavered Sona nervously. Vaiti, hardly looking at him, pulled something out of her dress and flung it down carelessly on the mat between the two. Sona’s eyes glittered, for he heard the chink of gold.

“Take it, old pig of the woods,” said Vaiti contemptuously, and he clutched eagerly at the little parcel of rag. It contained a roll of gold coins. Sona, panting with mingled delight and fear lest his visitor should change her mind, scuttled away to some hiding-hole in an inner room, and concealed the packet with breathless haste. Then he returned to the lamp-lit room, where Vaiti sat smoking and waiting.

“I am yours, high chieftainess; I am yours,” he repeated, rubbing his hands together and cackling.

“What is this thing they tell about a devil that stays upon the road to Mua, and comes out at night-time?” asked Vaiti carelessly, looking over Sona’s head at the wall.

Sona shut up his eyes very tight, and shook his shaggy little head from side to side.

“If you ask the good misinari doctor, he will tell you,” he answered. “As for me, I have nothing to do with devils. I am a very old man, and I want to go to heaven.

“You will go to-night, old scorpion-head, if you do not tell me everything I want to know,” remarked Vaiti. Her tone was pleasant, but there was a flavour of something else below the pleasantness that caused Sona, literally and figuratively, to sit up.

“I tell, I tell, high chieftainess,” he stammered eagerly. “The thing is known to all the people on the island—even the white people. It happened only last year, and it is as true as the Good Book. It was the foolish man from Mua way, whom they called a witch-doctor—and every one knows that such a thing does not exist, high chieftainess; but they said he was that thing, and he said so himself, because he was proud and mad. Now, we all know that there are many devils on Niué, and that the misinaris never were able to drive them all away. And there is a very bad devil on that road to Mua, right where the six palm-trees stand up by themselves among the graves. It is powerless in the day, but at night there is no Niué man who would dare to go there. Sometimes the white traders will ride past the place coming home in the dark, but it is a true thing that their horses will often shy and bolt when they come near to the home of the devil, and no man can say why; indeed, the devils, for the most part, do not have power over the ’papalangi.’

“So this witch-doctor, as he called himself, said that he did not fear the devil, and he would go and stay the night among the graves, thinking that because of that all the people in the island would believe in him, and give him many pigs and yams for fear of his ’mana.’ So he went to the devil-place, and all night he stayed, but in the morning he did not come back at all. And by-and-by all the people of his village went together to look for him. And they found him lying on the road, all dead, and his face was black and his body twisted up. So the people brought him to the misinari doctor, and he said that he could not make him alive again. And the traders said, ’What is the kind of this death? We do not know it, though we are white men and know everything.’ But the misinari doctor did not know. And they buried him, and that is all, high chieftainess.”

Vaiti smoked thoughtfully. She had heard something of the tale before, and Sona’s story did not vary from the version that was generally current about the island. She thought, on the whole, that she believed in it. There was no doubt that many of the white people gave it credit, though a few of them declared the man must have died in a drunken fit. A paper in Australia had published an account of the mysterious incident, and the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research society had been sent up to the island, inquiring into the matter. But it happened that the trader to whom the letter was addressed had committed suicide a good many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins (much appreciated by his successor) were growing green upon his grave by the time the letter reached the island. So the inquiry was never answered.

Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the story. That a similar result would follow in the case of a “papalangi” (white man) who followed the deceased magician’s example she did not, however, believe. She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of one kind or another would result.... And if the worst should chance to come about....

Vaiti took another cigar.

“What does your misinari say?” she asked. “He is not the right sort of misinari, it is true, but still, he should know more about devils than the traders.”

“Our good misinari was not here when it happened,” replied Sona in a pious tone. “It was the doctor misinari. Our own good misinari says that devils cannot do harm to any but bad men.”

Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor. She really had some respect, in an odd, upside-down kind of way, for missionary opinion. It is bred in the bone with the younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.

Donahue was certainly a very bad man. She did not think she had ever met any one much worse. Perhaps the badness, balanced against the whiteness, might swing down the scale. At any rate....

“Hear me, Sona!” she said, in a voice of command. “I have bought you to-night, and you belong to me. There will be more to pay by-and-by if you do as I tell you. But I would warn you to be careful, for you will not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with your inside hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs coming running to eat you before you are dead, as you will if you make any mistakes. Listen, then, very carefully.”

“I listen, I listen!” cried Sona.

*CHAPTER XIV*

*HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK*

When the trader’s wife came in next morning with Vaiti’s cup of tea, she was touched to see how deeply her pretty lodger was sleeping.